The tide of news by telegraph had continued with the years. Facilities had been improved, the Morse clicked into virtually every town in the country, but the old method was the same. Day in and day out, sending operators took dispatches, translated them into the dash-dot of code, and the telegraph keys sent the signals on the circuits at a rate of twenty-five to thirty-five words a minute. In member newspaper offices along the line the Morse sounders clack-clacked busily and receiving operators translated the code symbols back into words, copying the stories in jerky spurts. The news of more than half a century had been handled that way. For some time, however, Charles L. Krum, a Chicago cold-storage engineer, and his son Howard had been working to perfect an automatic machine which would send the printed word by wire at greater speed without the intermediary of code. They called their invention the Morkrum Telegraph Printer—coining the word Morkrum by combining the inventor’s name with the first syllable in the last name of Joy Morton, a Chicago businessman who financed them. [Illustration: Fig. 6 A SENDING OPERATOR SAT AT A KEYBOARD LIKE THAT OF A TYPEWRITER. Reproduced from _AP—The Story of News_, by permission of Associated Press.] Several other automatic telegraphic devices were being promoted, but (Kent) Cooper and engineers in the Traffic Department decided Krum’s machine held the most promise for their purposes. Tests got under way. In the Associated Press headquarters, which had been moved seven blocks from the old Western Union building to 51 Chambers Street, a sending operator sat at a keyboard similar to that of an ordinary typewriter. As he struck the keys, copying the dispatches before him, the machine perforated a paper tape with a series of holes, each combination representing a letter. The tape fed into a box-like transmitter which transformed the tape perforations into electrical impulses and sent them along the wires into the receiving machines in newspaper offices. These impulses actuated telegraph relays and set the receiving Morkrum machines automatically reproducing the letters which the sending operators were typing miles away. The tests demonstrated that the Morkrum could transmit news hour after hour at the rate of sixty words a minute and the copy was delivered clean and uniform. Thus began the slow extension of Morkrum transmission to the whole leased wire system, replacing the “brass pounding” Morse keys. It was a transition that required years and until it was completed both Morse and Morkrum worked side by side in many places.